There’s something very moving about Pupul’s attempt to understand his mother by vacuuming up the sights and sounds of Hong Kong and fitting them carefully into his Western-style DJ art. It works on a human level — we can all relate to losing people that we love — but also as music. Letter to Yu is poignant and powerful.

Time Is Glass is lovely music — that much should be no surprise to anyone — but beyond that, it taps into something invisible, deep and important. Is it too much to say that these songs manifest the divine? Maybe so, but let’s stipulate at least that they’re trying.

The organic feel and sense of Shabaka’s humility and vulnerability makes Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace a moving and impressive album.

It’s difficult to imagine the record being more fully-realized and immersive than it is, and it stands as a towering achievement in Toral’s formidable body of work.

White, who is deeply respected by his peers, makes some clever moves on All Hits: Memories which clear the way. The first move is to turn toward free jazz, where solo percussion is a bit more familiar than in indie rock. Without doubt he has the chops, too, shifting between groovy phrases and episodes that expand and branch rhizomatically.

The music, befitting the subject matter, is at turns somber and hopeful, developing slowly and deliberately and captivating from start to finish.

Drahla clearly knows their progenitors, but one needn’t focus on this legacy when listening to angeltape. It is a singular document by a distinctive and up-and-coming group.

Much like BC,NR’s magnificent Ants From Up There, the album feels like several potential closers have been strung together during the album’s final stretch, which could have been trimmed a little to maximize the impact of what’s left. Nevertheless, this is an extremely colorful, fun and addictive record that showcases the enviable talents of a young band with a bright future.

In short, the observations are sharp and the music cranks. Twenty-first century Brooklyn doesn’t sound like much fun, but Bodega does.

It still squalls and surges and executes little folk-infused turns of melody, it still uses words with a scalpel to precise and premeditated effect, and it still sounds great.

The second half of Marciology especially drags on. It’s not songs but huge chunks of poetry piled up, heavy on wordplay, with rhyming done nicely, almost perfectly. But not many of the tracks work as songs at all. Mediocre verses from guests only makes the material more sluggish.

The sound blooms; Tiger’s Blood is the most polished of Crutchfield’s albums to date.

The very real pleasure of this collection of songs comes in how the love of tradition collides with raucous rule-breaking energy. You’ve got your outlaw country, sure, but did any of those guys write a song called “Motherfucker” and carry it off? Shook does. Not every song stomps. Some are plaintive and yearning, like the lovely “Jane Doe,” others full of anthemic slow-rocking swirl like “Nightingale.” But all insist on direct emotional engagement and brutal honesty and acceptance of a very specific point of view.

There isn’t a singular, clear message of hope on The Great Bailout, but in documenting the rage and despair built into life under such a ugly and evil system, Moor Mother has provided something just as valuable — if not more so— in understanding the struggles of the present day.

While Lenker included a couple of songs on abysskiss that were later reworked as full-band songs on the masterful U.F.O.F. (“Terminal Paradise” and “From”), here the acoustic version sounds like a step backward and doesn’t feel like it belongs, especially given this album’s 45-minute runtime. Nonetheless, there’s plenty of gorgeous material here, offering further evidence of Lenker’s subtle and surprising songwriting.

True to its title, Playing Favorites is still, despite the varied palette, obviously a Sheer Mag album and not without its share of more or less straightforward, beat-up-leather-jacket rockers. More or less, because even these often push the band’s sonic parameters.

She returns with a more personal album, the tragically influenced yet unbowed Untame the Tiger.

For an artist working with such a recognizable palette, Sadier manages to keep painting in bold and striking colors. In terms of the production, this is decidedly Sadier’s best-sounding solo album to date.

This is a powerful piece of work, as serious about the trippy silliness as about the pitch and heave of amp overload. Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom, like its title, is several things at once. It rocks like a hurricane, dreams like a lotus eater.

Y’Y has its lovely moments, but it wallows sometimes in woo-woo-y mysticism. It’s a bit soft and cushiony, hard edges sanded down to harmless auras.

For all the sturm und drang on Half Divorced, the component parts of each song are well-differentiated and clean. You get a clear sense of both the individual performances and their interaction.

Friko’s songs are real, true and felt. Songs like “Where We Been” and “Crashing Through” build from small beginnings, voice, guitar, piano into huge anthemic refrains and breakdowns.

Recorded mostly solo, with Segall on guitar and drums, it pushes classic guitar rock into complicated corners, with choral motets sidling up to blistering guitar solos, noodle electric keyboard textures glittering atop blasts of pared down percussion.

Most importantly, Imitation of War feels more like an evolved, full-band recording, rather than a solo, singer-songwriter record embellished by the contributions of other musicians. Though Cohen strips back to just voice and her formidable guitar chops on songs such as “Under Gates of Cobalt Blue” and “Olympia,” it’s the full-band songs that really shine.

“Nonaah” is the perfect vehicle for the trio of Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh and Tyshawn Sorey and a stunningly vibrant distillation of what sets the group, and this album, apart from so many others. .... There is no one composing with Iyer’s blend of sonority sequences, those harmonic exhortations and rebuttals that slide in and out of focus with the veteran’s complete grasp and easy grace.

Listening to Souvenir, I can’t help but think of Stuck, the Chicago post-punk-into-no-wave outfits that sometimes refers to itself as “evil Omni.” .... Comparing the two, you might begin to wonder if there’s anything solid behind Omni’s detached cleverness, it’s super clean, super manicured attack. Maybe regular Omni could benefit from a touch of evil.

The narrator’s desire for transformation reveals a hopeful, but tenuous ending to an emotionally fraught and musically ironclad journey. One wishes more concept albums were so authentic.

From free jazz to contemporary modern ensemble music, Halvorson has made thoughtful arrangements for Amaryllis. It’s great to hear her rock out too, playing with an abandon that has been simmering all along.

Harm’s Way is sharper and more exhilarating than its predecessor; it’s the same aesthetic but more clearly, exuberantly realized.

While it’s unmistakably a Mascis solo album, What Do We Do Now just stands apart from anything he’s done to date.

The Umbrellas have always offered bashed up, joyriding sweetness, but here they reach at—and intermittently attain—a Spector-esque wall of rock ‘n roll sound. Even better, that larger scale doesn’t undermine the vulnerability of their songs, but instead amplifies and clarifies it.

Compared to its predecessor, Wall of Eyes can’t help but come across as transitional. While there are some undeniably great moments, the overall experience feels a little low-stakes and disappointing.

These tunes are constructed around static, meditational sonic atmospheres that fluctuate in volume and timbre but do not fundamentally change. There’s a sense of the eternal in them, even when as in “Scarper” they twitch into propulsion with percolating electronic rhythms.

It’s a very good set of songs, sleek and wrenching at the same time.

Bertucci’s work continues to develop. Of Shadow and Substance presents two facets of “drone, dissonance, and dynamics” that speak with eloquence, treading lightly but palpably on extra-musical concerns.

I DES is an ambitious, moving work.

The album is vigorous in its grooves and leaves a powerful, unifying impression with its words.

This is, in other words, still serious music, yet it is not necessarily somber. Probably not coincidentally, When the Roses Come Again provides the perfect soundtrack for a drive through a land of woods, farms, and small towns dotted with Dollar General stores and cell towers.

It’s not an indulgent album. There’s a discipline to every song. No note sounds wasted or out of place. It so perfectly captures the spirit of those gritty 1980’s psychosexual thrillers, at once lush and foreboding.

Mostly, though, these cuts take songs that you probably already know and deliver them slightly transformed by time and personnel and the live setting. They’re old friends, a little older, a little shaggier, but still magic: “Wolves (Song of the Shepherd’s Dog),” “About a Bruise” and “Dearest Forsaken.” If you ever loved them, you should hear them like this, too.

The balance of spoken word and music is well-conceived. .... Less than halfway through, the Coin Coin series is engaging and ever new.

Over the course of Spike Field’s 50 minutes, the songs’ prevalent mood can prove hypnotic if you’re receptive to its atmosphere. MBC is certainly adept at conjuring and sustaining a melancholy, nocturnal scene.

We worship “cool” in rock and punk. We love the bands that stay unaffected behind their dark shades, from the Velvets on down. But what’s so great about this second Bar Italia album is that it shows how hard that is, and what a cost it exacts.

The Comeback Kid, is full of shimmering, ultra fanciful castles of guitar-based sound, but it’s also kind of an experimental pop gem, like Deerhoof after a month of Guitar Hero or like OOIOO any time, really.

While Jenny from Thebes is a self-proclaimed rock opera, it defies the expectations of that genre inasmuch as it’s not a sprawling, self-indulgent double album. Moreover, it stands on its own.

It is way over the top in the way that Roxy Music was, all sheen and sigh and gorgeous inertia. Romantic Music, yes, no irony there.

What makes Nothing Lasts Forever especially rewarding for fans is the emotional throughline that connects their work, album to album.

She swoops and swoons and growls like Kristin Hersh but more country, and it’s worth a listen just to hear what she’ll do next.

Irreversible Entanglements are looking forward, stepping up from the shoulders of the giants to shape a body of work that demands attention.

An album that, without lyrics, tells its stories with many voices and in a poetry that feels tangible, even as it transforms in front of us, catching more light in its sound as it blooms.

Here chilly, cerebral ideas provide structure for enticing pop, and the sweetness comes with a bit of vertigo.

On first listen Halo’s compositions tend to merge into one another, a blur of impressions like looking down on a cloud dappled landscape or passing buildings through a rain smeared train window. The atmospheres are foggy, drenched but rich, infused with the apparent illogic of dreams whose significance must be pieced together with hindsight from clues obvious and obscure.

The album as a whole is more often prone to meander, as if the band gets a little lost in their new terrain, unable, at times, to bring their thought full circle.

For Mahalia, with Love, like Jesup Wagon and Lewis’s “Molecular” releases, is fairly high-concept, but the music is spunky and easy to enjoy, with plenty of groove and intensity.

Perennial is an easy-flowing new collection of songs, including a number of dynamic instrumentals, which showcase the chemistry among the players.

Nothing overtakes Williamson’s singing and the basic keyboard and guitar accompanying elements. The songs themselves are artful creations.

There are listeners that will be drawn to and make much of the brightest moments on The Enduring Spirit: the breezy string work at the beginning and in the middle section of “Will of Whispers”; the guitar tone and most theatrical moments in “Servants of Possibility,” which may put some in the mind of Steve Howe, c. 1971; the long slide through melodic atmospherics in the second half of “The Enduring Spirit of Calamity.” This reviewer prefers the tougher stuff.

You could say that not much happens in Shone a Rainbow Light On, that it moves slowly and doesn’t progress in any linear way, but that would be missing out on the blessed stillness and calm that lives in these tracks.

There’s a good deal of spoken word on this album, the sort of poetry that’s meant to inspire but seems a little overblown. It’s part of the genre, obviously, and it gets swallowed, soon enough, by groove. But you have to stick with it through the flute-scented rites of “First Peoples,” the downtempo intro to “Re-Memory” to get to the music. I could do without it, personally. The music, though, is pretty great.

There’s the sparklingly Beatles-esque “Daddy’s Gone,” the bright, Mellotron-laced “Evening Star Supercharger,” and “The Scull of Lucia” is reminiscent of Radiohead’s “No Surprises,” with a naïve, music-box feel to its melodies. It’s in Bird Machine’s heavier moments, though, where the album really hits home — and the loss of a unique artist is most keenly felt.

Political protest was baked into her music, often in very explicit ways. Performing “prayer for amerikkka pt 1&2,” from 2019’s FLY or DIE II: bird dogs of paradise in Switzerland, she reminded her audience, “it’s not always time to be neutral.” Speaking truth to power (or audiences, anyway) is one thing, but branch engaged in the arguably more difficult political project of community-building.

It amounts to a frustrating end to a frustrating record, one where some great sounds and ideas aren’t fully worked through into wholly successful songs.

Barely a moment passes without her voice proudly standing front and center, leading the listener through bittersweet songs that surrender to the ebb and flow of how it feels to be a twenty-something woman in twenty-first-century America.

Backed by twinkling music-box guitars, a line such as “I knew the moment that I saw you that my life would never by the same” feels too sugar-sweet to resonate. The musical chemistry evident among Meek’s band of talented players thankfully overpowers this tendency for the most part.

Goulden sublimely aw-fuck-it delivery makes nearly everything sound sardonic, but there’s a bottom note of pure yearning here. The song [“Southern Rock”] smolders most of the way, and then bursts into flame in a rollicking chorus.

Fans will consider the show essential for its historical significance and the quality of the setlist, but the album’s energy pushes it beyond a completist live album, making Live in Brooklyn 2011 a wonderful cap to one of experimental rock’s greatest discographies.

Welshpool Frillies digs right back into the basics. It slaps in the most elemental way, on clanging power chords and thumping rhythms and Pollard’s bright absurdities cranked to top volume.

Keeping Secrets feels like, itself, a bit of a hidden gem, murmured at you rather than shouted, a quiet one but a grower.

Their take on classic guitar rock sometimes lapses into a mid-tempo morass but Bush Tetras have been a constant state of evolving for nearly four decades. Sley and Place are still compelling presences, and it’s good to have them back.

A Trip to Bolatanga is on strong ground. The combination of nyabinghi hand drumming, booming kick drum, funky guitar, house-ready piano accents and bobbing clarinet on “Accra Electronica” sounding simultaneously of this time and timeless, and there’s no denying the beats’ substantial bang, which both demands and rewards volume deals.

The magic of I’ve Got Me comes in the way that brutal sentiment comes dancing in on skittery melody and how coruscating lines conform so neatly to classic song structure. Joanna Sternberg makes tales of betrayal and non-conformity sound like tunes from 1930s black and white musicals, and that’s an accomplishment.

Despite their darkest moments and constant shifts in tempo, tone and style Being Dead sound totally in control. The kitchen sink maybe threatened with an unmooring but Where Horses Would Run is greater than its many parts, held together by sheer joy of music making and the commitment of the trio to give free rein to their instincts.

These songs are massive, yet also bent and personal in a way that lets you in even as they blow you back against the wall.

The instrumental parts patiently map out their terrain, Harvey intones her vivid poetry, often backed by long-time collaborator John Parish’s affecting voice, then the song will stand aside. It’s only on repeat listens and by drawing threads between the individual songs that the beauty of the whole begins to take form.

Listen and you’ll feel a smile tugging at the corner of your mouth. The music is rigorous but fun.

The emotional excavation Jayda G has done with her sophomore album is admirable to witness and a joy to hear.

The record is better when the music does the talking, as it usually does for Divide and Dissolve.

This is an impressive statement from a band that’s still forming itself. Its sound is distinctive and compelling, but still audibly shifting as they go. It’s hard to imagine where they might end up ten or even five years out, but my guess is it’ll be someplace cool and very different from where they are now.

You can hear both elements jostling for precedence, the celebratory euphoria of live performance filtering through the doubts and uncertainties and complications of extended time in one’s own head. It’s the combination that’s so thrilling here, in a sound that swirls and envelopes and jitters but remains just out of reach, like the dream of a dream of a dream of life before.

If you like your punk rock distilled to purity, every idea boiled down to staccato essence, then pony up for Sweeping Promises. It’s bright and nervy, nodding towards funk but with all the grime scrubbed out of the seams.

Though none of these eight songs are anything less than fun, dynamic, and intensely listenable, lead single “Housefly” is probably the pick of the bunch; it arrives early, hits hard, and is the most economically arranged of all the songs.

In Black Duck, they draw on many different aspects of their respective, eclectic backgrounds, flitting freely from sun-drenched cosmic country, to driving kraut rock, to radiant, enveloping ambiences, all played so expertly that it seems effortless, though it probably isn’t.

Her voice, pure and high with a lemon-y sharp tang, is a mesmerizing thing, all on its own, and more than a conduit for the traditional and original songs she delivers here.

This Is the Kit’s new album, Careful Of Your Keepers, has a wonderfully languid, rolling, fluid quality.

Contradiction proves mesmerizing across Space Heavy’s tightly executed 45 minutes.

Though there’s nothing here that’s particularly original or knock-you-flat outstanding, it’s all handled impeccably, recorded vividly, and sequenced smartly to make the album’s 38 minutes fly by.

Is it a sleek and assured Euro-pop stylist or a morose, sardonic realist, messy and desperate and unsatisfied with the way things are? It is both, sometimes simultaneously. The mix of poise and scruffiness fluctuates continually. .... The point is that there’s plenty of lounge-y, jazzy pop here, but it’s most affecting when it twists slightly off true.

Musically it feels like business as usual, but there’s a spark missing, as if the events of the last few years have pummelled the life out of the band, resulting in a frustratingly uneven record.

After dancing through all these keys of fear, loss, and distress, the record ends with “Send for Me,” a simple and moving pledge to come pick you up, whatever happens. The slow bloom of warmth feels hard won, but not even remotely fragile.

In Of Tomorrow, Lawrie sacrifices some of the pummeling noise and subterranean murk of previous albums without losing his ability to draw listeners into his twilit world. With his voice to the fore and some shafts of melodic light, he once more tweaks The Telescopes’ sound in ways that remain compelling.

Romantiq is a strong addition to Popp’s compendious catalog, one that unifies certain sound selections and approaches while providing ample variety.

It’s been a while since an album surprised me, not just the first time through, but continually, throughout the listening experience. Everyone’s Crushed keeps you guessing, all the way through, and that’s kind of a miracle. Bravo.

Jazzy horn breaks? Twinkling bar-room piano? Doo-wop backing vocals? All this and more crops up in ways both unusual and satisfying. Rutili is also in fine lyrical form. Many of the songs begin with strange and imaginative opening lines.

“Tinde,” at the end, floats a woman’s ululating tones over bare, echoing percussion. But mostly, Amatssou sounds exactly like you expect Tinariwen to sound, like its drifting to you over acres of sand, like it’s moving your bare feet to dance, and that is a very good thing.

Nothing quite so interesting develops; instead, heavy generic riffs create the impression that Dave Grohl may be waiting in the wings to launch into an anthemic chorus. ... This is music that would sound best after the third beer. I hope, though, that Tyler is preparing to offer up some fresh, forward-looking music soon.

Garden Party is full of good feeling. Put it on and you can smell cut grass and barbecue. You can hear the pop of the can on your first outdoor beer of the spring. There are bluegrass-y runs and two-stepping rambles, all blurred on a microdose that makes everything brighter and more beautiful.

Moor Mother, Michael Stipe, Sharon van Etten, Bon Iver, Rokia Koné, and Jeff Parker lend their talents to Oh Me Oh My, affording its arrangements and production a mutability that supports, never dilutes, Holley’s aesthetic. ... Holley without guest stars is no less compelling.

The resulting sound is clear and resonant, which does justice to the music Orcutt’s composed. And instead of feral yelps, ringing phones, and passing traffic, the guitarist accompanies himself with subliminally registered breaths.